Critical think ing II: Evaluating written argu ments

2.3.1 Reconstruction

Many argu ments – partic u larly written ones – do not come in a readily iden-ti fi able form of a set of premises leading to a conclu sion. In order to eval u ate the rational persuas ive ness of an argu ment, a basic assump tion of crit ical think ing is that the argu ment needs to be reor gan ised so that the premises and conclu sion are salient. The product of this extrac tion proced ure is often referred to as ‘stand ard form’. The crit ical think ing books mentioned in 2.2.1 carry this assump tion. Here, for example in an excerpt from Butterworth and Thwaites (2013: 28–29):

because there are many ways in which an argu ment can be expressed, it is conveni ent to have one stand ard form for setting argu ments out. The custom ary way to do this, both in logic and crit ical think ing, is to place the reasons in a list, and to separ ate them from the conclu sion by a hori-zontal line. The line performs the same func tion as words such as ‘there-fore’ or ‘so’ in natural language reas on ing.

[. . .]

Reconstructing an argu ment in a stand ard form helps to make the reas on ing clear and assists with its subsequent eval u ation.

The argu ments in 2.2.2 and in this section are in stand ard form. This process of extract ing the argu ment’s logical struc ture, of distilling stand ard form, is known as recon struc tion.⁶

With a face- to-face argu ment, or say a real- time (‘synchron ous’) online debate, parti cipants can check with one another whether they have accur-ately recon struc ted each other’s argu ments. What happens, though, when we are confron ted with a written argu ment with no access to the author? (Unless other wise flagged this is what I mean by ‘written argu ment’ in this book).

Recall two sentences from the pro-GM argu ment I laid out in the preface:

[A] UK farmers must be given the freedom to choose modern, effi cient farming methods based on tried and tested science.

[B] We need science- based decision- making. The world has moved on, and it’s time the anti- science activ ists did too.

Here is one possible recon struc tion of its premises:

Premise 1: decision- making about agri cul ture should have a scientific basis

Premise 2: GM is based on science

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Conclusion 1: anti-GM activ ists are thus anti- science.

Conclusion 2: anti-GM activ ists should stop resist ing a scientific atti tude to agri cul ture which, in turn, would allow UK farmers the freedom to choose GM agri cul ture.

But how object ive is my recon struc tion? Your inter pret a tion of the logical struc ture of the argu ment may be differ ent to mine, and you may take issue with what I did. You may recon struct the premises differ ently; you may say there should be only one conclu sion. And this recon struc tion is based on only two sentences from the argu ment (we shall see the complete argu ment in Chapter 5). The longer the argu ment, the more that possib il it ies open up for differ ent readers to reach differ ent recon struc tions.

2.3.2 Implicit premises

Commonly, we leave out premises in argu ments because we assume they are obvious to an audi ence and thus will easily be inferred. As illus tra tion, let me return to an earlier example. The follow ing argu ment is sound:

Premise 1: All human beings are mortal.

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Conclusion: Therefore Morrissey is mortal once we flag the impli cit premise:

Premise 2: Morrissey is a human being

Since ‘Morrissey’ logic ally entails ‘human being’ – and anyone who knows who Morrissey is will auto mat ic ally know this – here we have a straight for-ward example of being able to recover an impli cit premise. In a real- time debate, we have, in prin ciple, the oppor tun ity to ascer tain from our inter-locutor any impli cit premises. Yet, as I commen ted in the last section, this is not so possible with a written argu ment where the reader is not directly debat ing with its author. And what if the argu ment is long and complex?

There may be many impli cit premises to recover, making the recon struc tion of an argu ment labor i ous.

When a writer constructs an argu ment, they have a partic u lar audi ence in mind. Given this, they do not have to spell everything out. They can rely on their audi ence to fill in impli cit premises, because they can assume relev ant back ground know ledge. But what if the crit ical analyst of the argu ment does not know the target audi ence? They would not be wholly convers ant

with the culture of the target audi ence, its values and back ground assump-tions. In such circum stances, there is always the danger that the analyst either misses impli cit premises (under- inter pret a tion) or projects premises into an argu ment that the author did not intend and the target audi ence would not gener ate (over- inter pret a tion).⁷ There are ways of check ing the poten tial under/over- inter pret a tion of our recon struc tions. For example, we could get help from other analysts to see the degree to which they confirm our recon struc tion. If other analysts are members of, or know well the target constitu ency of the argu ment, all to the good. Moreover, there are soft ware tools which assist such collab or at ive recon struc tion by visu al ising the argu-ment’s (impli cit) premises and conclu sion(s).⁸ This soft ware is partic u larly helpful where argu ments are lengthy and complex. All the same, if the most effect ive usage of this soft ware is collab or at ive, in better address ing poten-tial over/under- inter pret a tion, this reduces its utility when we are faced with argu ments we wish to crit ic ally eval u ate solo.

2.3.3 Lack of know ledge of the topic

Another issue with assess ing an argu ment – a funda mental one – is reflec ted in the follow ing utter ance of Socrates from Plato’s Gorgias:

The orator need have no know ledge of the truth about things; it is enough for him to have discovered a knack of convin cing the ignor ant that he knows more than the experts.

(Plato, 1960: 38) If we lack know ledge of the topic, we may be suscept ible to persua sion by char lat ans who either pretend know ledge or delib er ately omit things central to a topic. Without suffi cient know ledge of the argu ment’s topic, we are not in a posi tion to assess relev ant absences from the argu ment.

2.3.4 Lack of know ledge of the oppos i tion’s stand point and the ubiquity of straw man argu ments

In a real- time debate, an arguer’s distor tion of the oppos i tion’s stand point will more than likely be spotted by the oppon ent and imme di ately chal lenged. Yet, with a written argu ment, if the audi ence is not so famil iar with the stand point being criti cised, they could be swayed by the argu ment when it is a straw man.

Tracy Bowell and Gary Kemp define a straw man argu ment as follows:

the tech nique used when an arguer ignores their oppon ent’s real posi-tion on an issue and sets up a weaker version of that posi posi-tion by misrep-res ent a tion, exag ger a tion, distor tion or simpli fic a tion.

(Bowell and Kemp, 2015: 252)

Straw man argu ments contra vene the stand point rule of pragma- dialectics (2.2.3) and are thus dialect ic ally falla cious argu ments. Moreover, as the argu ment a tion schol ars Scott Aikin and John Casey rightly hold, straw man argu ments are ubiquit ous:

One encoun ters the straw man virtu ally anywhere there is an argu ment.

This is espe cially so in the heated exchanges about polit ics and reli gion on Cable TV talk shows, talk radio, inter net discus sion forums, and news pa per op- ed pages.

(Aikin and Casey, 2011: 87) The above general defin i tion of a straw man by Bowell and Kemp can be discrim in ated. Talisse and Aikin (2006) argue for two differ ent forms of straw man: i) misrep res ent a tion and ii) selec tion. The first form involves a speaker or writer advan cing an argu ment which, while accur ately describ ing some elements of the stand point, misrep res ents crucial aspects. The second straw man type does not involve misrep res ent a tion. However, it is a highly select ive descrip tion; the antag on ist presents peri pheral aspects of the stand-point as being equi val ent to the stand stand-point’s main thrust. They do this because these peri pheral elements are easier to criti cise than the more central elements. Talisse and Aikin (2006) also call this second type of straw man the weak man.

Aikin and Casey (2011) expand upon Talisse and Aikin (2006) by propos ing a further sub- type of straw man argu ment – the hollow man.

While the misrep res ent a tion straw man and weak man bear some resem-blance to the stand point which is attacked in the argu ment, the hollow man is a complete fabric a tion. The proponent of the stand point which is being attacked simply did not advance an argu ment resem bling the stand point.

2.3.5 Deciding on irrel ev ance

What if an arguer makes irrel ev ant points? If we are not in the know, we may find it much more diffi cult to winnow relev ance from irrel ev ance. There is a chance that we just give up on the argu ment, think ing we are not intel-li gent enough to under stand it when actu ally it is a weak argu ment, and the author has delib er ately brought in irrel ev ant mater ial to try to obfus cate the argu ment’s weak ness. This is more likely to work with longer argu ments:

Relevance is by defin i tion a rela tional notion (a premise is either relev ant or not with respect to a given conclu sion), thus assess ing it involves appre ci at ing the struc tural connec tions between differ ent parts of the discourse, often involving long and complex sequences of sub- argu ments.

[. . .]

. . . relev ance is diffi cult to assess and there fore relat ively unprob lem-atic to hide. As a consequence, unless the speaker is keen to invite criti-cism against his posi tion, he has reason not to be too expli cit in signal ing the struc ture of his argu ments.

(Paglieri, 2009: 4) One might counter, however, that if an author delib er ately obfus cates the logical struc ture of their argu ment through making it diffi cult to decide on the relev ance of certain inform a tion, then they have in effect sabot aged it, prevent ing the argu ment’s assess ment. Anticipating this counter, Paglieri (2009: 4) rebuts as follows. (‘Argumentative indic at ors’, mentioned below, are words such as ‘so’, ‘then’, ‘thus’):

we are all inclined to see struc ture where there isn’t any . . . Hence, in the absence of any argu ment at ive indic ator, we are quite willing to provide them for free, and this in turn justi fies a general tend ency to be rather evasive on the struc ture of one’s argu ments.

I concur. And this leads to another problem. In impos ing struc ture – effect ively over- inter pret ing the argu ment – we may be strength en ing the logical struc ture of an other wise weakly construc ted argu ment (Walton, 2005: 114–115).

2.3.6 Reconstructing an argu ment deforms cohes ive struc ture with poten tial loss of non- rational persuas ive text

Cohesion refers to how a text hangs together through its vocab u lary and grammar. For example, in:

Mary had a little lamb. Its fleece was white as snow.

cohesion is created across the sentences through ‘lamb’ and ‘its’. Cohesion in a text is hardly trivial. Indeed, as the linguists Ronald Carter and Walter Nash say, ‘The first require ment of any compos i tion is that it should “hang together” . . .’ (Carter and Nash, 1990: 189). Just like any effect ive text, the text of an argu ment needs to be well- formed:

Cohesion distin guishes well- formed texts, focus ing on an integ rated topic, with well- signalled internal trans itions . . . It is founded on a very simple prin ciple: each sentence after the first is linked to the content of one or more preced ing sentences by at least one tie.

(Fowler, 1996: 83) Cohesion is crucial, then, to the effect ive ness of an argument and thus to its persuas ive ness.

The three dimen sions to argu ment – logical, dialect ical and rhet or ical – can inter sect at differ ent points. This means that premises (logical) might be cohes ively linked by repeated rhet or ical lexis. Where these dimen sions inter-sect, recon struc tion poten tially evicts cohe sion which relates to the rhet or ical dimen sion. This can be alle vi ated by using as much of the language of the original argu ment as possible in laying out the premises and conclu sion. Then again, there may be areas of an argu ment where repeated rhet or ical lexis does not inter sect at all with its logical struc ture. The upshot is that fillet ing logical struc ture in recon struc tion runs the risk that we lose import ant aspects to the argu ment’s cohe sion which carry non- rational persuas ive force.

2.3.7 Summary

If we want to eval u ate the rational persuas ive ness of an argu ment, we need to recon struct it. So, I hope it is clear I am not against recon struc tion. I also wish to be clear that there are times when we don’t exper i ence recon struct ive head aches because argu ments are eleg antly and econom ic ally construc ted;

certainly, there are occasions when the road- map of premises to conclu sion is easy to follow. But there are other times. By stand ard ising the argu ment, we may be over- inter pret ing and under- inter pret ing impli cit premises. There are ways of trying to get round this issue, using other analysts and soft ware to facil it ate collab or at ive recon struc tion. But the more people we enlist to help us, the less conveni ent our crit ical engage ment with the argu ment becomes. And no matter how success ful the recon struc tion, it neces sar ily entails that we are break ing up the textual form in which the argu ment first appeared. This can mean we lose cohe sion relat ing to the argu ment’s rhet-or ical (rhet-or dialect ical) dimen sion which does not inter sect with the logical dimen sion. Lastly, know ledge of the argu ment’s topic and stand point is key to its recon struc tion, helping us to separ ate out irrel ev ant mater ial. So, if our know ledge is insuf fi cient here, recon struc tion and subsequent eval u ation of the argu ment will be impeded. As the reader will see in Parts II and III, the strategies put forward seek to circum vent these recon struct ive chal lenges.

I have come to the end of my cover age of crit ical think ing. The strategies of Parts II and III also emerge from engage ment with another tradi tion – Critical Discourse Analysis, in partic u lar its pedago gical dimen sion.

Sections 2.4, 2.5 and 2.6 provide cover age of this tradi tion.